NJPW New Beginning in Sendai

New Japan Pro-Wrestling
New Beginning in Sendai
14th February 2015
Sun Plaza, Sendai

The supposed new direction of NJPW in 2015 after part one of this two-part event feels a little familiar, but as Geoffrey Boycott said 'you have to see both sides bat'. I think I can just about shoehorn that one in here.

Captain New Japan and Manabu Nakanishi vs. Yohei Komatsu and Satoshi Kojima

For anyone who is an aficionado of this company then a quick glance at the names above might not exactly fill you with the greatest of hope, but this is a fine little opener mainly because Kojima and Komatsu are good fiery babyfaces despite being at the opposite ends of their career arcs.

NAKANISHIMANIAFOREVER

They feed for the limited CNJ and Nakanishi after running through their crowd-pleasing material and tease the win for the Young Lion Komatsu before Nakanishi dumps him for the pin. It's not rocket science but it is a good way to open a wrestling show. **3/4

Nakanishi and Captain New Japan d. Komatsu and Kojima

reDRagon (Bobby Fish and Kyle O'Reilly) vs. Tiger Mask and Jay White

I am really finding a great deal of entertainment in the variety of mis-spellings of Kyle O'Reilly's name. Thus far NJPW have rendered it:

• Kyle O'Reily
• Kyle O'Reilley
• Kyle O'Riley
• Kaile O'Reilly

As far as I know, they haven't got it right once and to be quite frank I hope the gimmick runs for a while. Anyway. reDRagon dropped the IWGP Jr. tags the other day so they're in search of a quick win to pick up some form. Jay White, one of the two newest dojo entrants, is part of the opposition and this represents the first time I've had a chance to get a look at him. He seems pretty good; basic, energetic, emitting that silently humble quality that all of the dojo dudes radiate.

Jay White, badly cut out

There's a nice spot where he has one of his opponents in a crab-like hold (I think all Young Lions are taught the secrets of the crab) whilst the other reDRagoner smacks him in the face to get him to release the hold. He shows some cool babyface fightinguuuspirituuuu and as a collective we are enjoying this until Tiger Mask lumbers along to cockblock the fun by kicking the assailant whilst the be-crabbed one makes a rope-break. At least that fleeting moment was fine.

Whilst these first three matches were going on I was mending a radiator so I missed the very mechanics of the finish but suffice to say reDRagon won and covered Jay White in a coolly-received match that was actually decent. **3/4

reDRagon d. Tiger and White

Kenny Omega and The Young Bucks (Matt and Nick Jackson) (Bullet Club) vs. Time Splitters (Alex Shelley and KUSHIDA) and Mascara Dorada

Having spent some time ruminating on my Omega-critique the other day (see: New Beginning in Osaka) I have considered that perhaps I did not offer enough criticism to either the booking (who tell him how much crazy shit he can get away with) or Taguchi (who has to make his presence felt somehow). Here, alongside PWG brethren The Young Bucks, against a solid multinational trio, is a chance to put this reappraisal in motion.

He was born with six titles so this isn't as successful as it looks

Maybe it's because the match is relatively low-stakes and pressure-free and no one needs to work as hard to 'get over' but I ended up enjoying this just as much as any of the junior outings from Osaka three days prior. The match serves to propel Dorada, who enters carrying his CMLL Welterweight Championship (don't worry, they won't need it back), as a credible opponent for Omega.

Everyone does a fair bit of flip-a-dip-doo (really liked the Double Indytaker by the Bullet Club players) but Dorada is the one who ultimately shines, pinning Omega with a roll-up. In Japan that isn't as prestigious as a clean wipeout win, but it puts Omega on notice that his next opponent can take the title  out of nowhere. Plenty of fun here. Dorada cuts a basic Japanese promo post-match. ***1/4 

Dorada & Time Splitters d. Bullet Club

***YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE THARPEZONE***

Resplendent in a spangly purple jacket, Bruce Tharpe-desu, attorney-at-law and President of the National Wrestling Alliance, generates some heat into the Sendai evening and introduces the first of his charges set to begin the NWA takeover of NJPW, blowing down the floodgates for Michael Tarver, Big Daddy Yum Yum and god forbid Kahagas.

NWA JUNIOR HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP
Jushin 'Thunder' Liger (c) vs. Chase Owens

In previous editions I had been charitable to Owens in his matches against BUSHI (get well soon bro) and Liger-san but I must confess that even at the age of 49 or 50 Liger is absolutely outworking the guy. Owens has a great stretch where he hits these nice backbreaker variations and keeps hold to inflict extra damage and we respectfully tip our hat to the 'Crown Jewel of the NWA'. Tharpe is living all of these moves at ringside and it is definitely an example of some fine heel management antics.

"Yes, two beers and half a plate of food to share please."

But Liger the man the god the beast is in his antic mode where you're just like 'this dude GOOD mang' and carries the whole damn show to a respectable match AND he gets to keep the belt which is great news, winning with a sassy pinning predicament. Tiger Mask is challenged directly by Liger in the post-match, which is not great news, though these New Japan Cup shows are often devoid of junior intrigue so it's a nice card-padding touch. ***  

Liger d. Owens (second defence)

Tharpe blows his stack, changes his jacket and regains his composure and introduces his sure thing, his major champion and company icon...

NWA WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP
Rob Conway (c) vs. Hiroyoshi Tenzan

Tenzan emerges as Tenzan is wont to: looking like a bemulleted wildebeest (actually a lot of wildebeest are pretty mullety anyway so perhaps this is a tautology) and able to generate a fair portion of sympathy and love from the Sendai crowd who have been pretty much better than Osaka so far. Rob Conway defies description to a certain extent; on Twitter I called him 'Austin Aries channelling a sex pest Union general in a Gettysburg nightclub' but that only really half approaches the sartorial weirdness that 'Ironman' is achieving.

Conway or the highway? Highway.

If you must locate the video to find Conway's entrance gear then please: stay for the match. Yes it starts off slowly and yes I was wearily sarcastic about its prospects but I will be damned if it doesn't develop into a worthy addition to the annals of great bouts contested for this piece of silverware. Not Steamboat/Flair, of course, but probably a shade better than Shane Douglas vs. Too Cold Scorpio from that weird period when ECW and NWA were bedfellows.

Conway, fighting a mere 30 days post-appendectomy, looked good in the Tag League and fine the other day and is definitely less prone to the old school Smokey Mountain southern-wrasslin' heavyweight lumberations and more able to jive alongside the hard-hitting clubbering of NJPW 2003 that Tenzan basically wrote the rulebook on. Tharpe, DEEP within the Tharpezone that lies within us all, tries to cheat a bit on behalf of his charge. For some reason I am ok when Tharpe cheats and yet am prone to moans when Bullet Club do it and I need to know why. Perhaps it is because we know that Tharpe is a hubristic loser type and Bullet Club are more like corporate jock weiners who win.

Tenzan is good here too and he really works his butt off like he did in the G1. It's not the graceful brutality of Nakamura or the methodical jabbing of Tanahashi or the incisive kick surgery of Shibata but more a slower version of the crash-bash-wallop stuff elsewhere on the midcard, with some nice touches thrown in. I have always been a fan of this spot where he locks in the Anaconda Vice and the opponent fights to their feet and then Tenzan cinches it in and SLAMS them down to the ground, a hope spot and a hope DENIED spot all in one. Someone in America should steal it.

Defying a belt shot and an errant manager, Tenzan wins the fuck out of the NWA World Heavyweight title, granting him the right to drop it quietly at the Cauliflower Alley show in Las Vegas and lose none of his awesome corona. Please give this match a try. ***3/4

Tenzan d. Conway to become new NWA World Heavyweight Champion.

***YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE THARPEZONE***

During intermission, Yuji Nagata sits down with Shinpei Nogami to talk about merchandise and Shinsuke Nakamura. I have no idea what was said on either count.

Golden Stardust (Tetsuya Naito and Kota Ibushi) vs. Kazushi Sakuraba and Toru Yano

There's no way that Kota Ibushi is doing any more than is strictly necessary here with a big DDT show tomorrow on which he has been booked as headliner for the best part of four months. He does some funny stagy-looking kickboxing with Sakuraba and tags out for the better part of the match, returning to dive around a bit before the close of play.

What's not to love?

Naito works much of the middle with Yano, who acts the fool and cheats and whacks Naito with a chair and rips off the turnbuckle and it's all pretty droll and I must admit that I am enjoying this. Naito fights back to hit his big spots; a running swanton, a missile dropkick and that weird corner series that ends with him taking a bigger bump than his opponent.

In a surprisingly long match, some 13 minutes from bell to bell, the end comes when Yano smashes Naito with the low blow but cannot quite hit the Urakusumi roll-up, with Naito landing on top and scoring the three whilst attempting to attend to the soreness in his testes. Nothing wrong with this one really. ***

Golden Stardust d. Yano & Sakuraba

Bullet Club (Yujiro Takahashi and Bad Luck Fale) vs. CHAOS (Kazuchika Okada and YOSHI-HASHI)

Everything good about this match came from the CHAOS team and it was largely painful to watch and I realise part of my writerly 'gimmick' is not being jaded and trying to be even-handed and reporterly but I am so tired of Fale and doubly-so Yujiro and triply-so their near-meaningless tag matches. Okada took the win with a Rainmaker on Yujiro and requested a match with Fale during the New Japan Cup. I don't know if that means he wants to fix the draw or have a match outside the NJC brackets but it will represent a challenge for Okada, who is an excellent dance partner but is largely untested as a dance leader. **

Bullet Club (Doc Gallows, Karl Anderson and Tama Tonga) vs. Hirooki Goto, Katsuyori Shibata and Hiroshi Tanahashi

It will take some time seeing Shibata as a regular character on New Japan screens and it will take even more adjustment seeing him swan around with Hiroshi "I HATE YOU KATSUYORI AND HERE IS A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK ALL ABOUT HOW MUCH OF A SELFISH SHIT YOU ARE" Tanahashi but ultimately I think we can get along with this development.

Fine non-stop action here as Shibata takes it to all of Bullet Club, who are face-painted to resemble three-quarters of Kiss (only Ace Frehley seems to be missing, which is a shame, because he had the best facepaint). Given the previous interaction between Kiss and professional wrestling one would assume it is not a wise ghost to let out of the coffin but what the hell.

Not the champs anymore, but you get the idea

A lot of folk are indicating a desire for a positive push for Tama Tonga, so I scrutinised him a bit more here as I am pretty certain what I feel about all the other dudes involved. I hate to report that I don't see much latitude for him to move anywhere yet, and whilst he is probably actively instructed to get little offence in and take bumps hither and thither, the offence he does get in looks a little sloppy and thin. Push him if one must, but at whose expense?

As sure as tick follows tock, Tonga takes the fall. Tanahashi sells his plastered eye much through the match and gets the win despite the pain with High Fly Flow. Normally on house shows he breezes through 20 minute multi-man main events and walks out the other side looking like he's emerged from the salon. Here he does look a bit scrambled. Have some weak tea and put your slippers on. ***1/4

Tanahashi, Goto & Shibata d. Bullet Club

NEVER OPENWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP - vacant
Tomohiro Ishii vs. Tomoaki Honma

No NEVER Openweight Championship bout this evening as champion Togi Makabe has a dose of the 'flu, so his second in Great Bash Heel steps up to the plate to take on the recently deposed champion Tomohiro Ishii. Togi Makabe has been stripped of his title after coming down with the 'flu and this match will yield I guess the correct way to describe it would be an interim champion but a new carrier of the strap just the same. A pair of matches in 2014 between these veterans of the entire circuit in Japan yielded high-class results, with Ishii taking the win each time in matches typical of both: dramatic and quasi-murderous.

Honma, just days after a thriller in defeat to Ibushi, turns in another classic Honma performance: high on expression and the sensation that the world is against you. He is Job in wrestling form. In this match he will win lariat battles, nail the Kokeshi from the turnbuckle to the outside like a complete lunatic and plant Ishii with the Pillar Crash and every time his face will scream "WHY ME?" at the kick-out. One day he will win and there will not be a dry eye anywhere in the world.

Ishii, relatively laid back since Wrestle Kingdom 9, also turns in a classic Ishii performance: high on surliness and a rather T-1000esque approach to feeling pain. His character belies some of his subtlety at selling, at losing a majority of the chop and lariat battles, because he always seems to come back for more.

The match goes long - arguably a little too long if only for the style of the two guys. They start off at a lower lick, but after a blazing chop battle, they hit the higher gear and press it down until near the 25 minute mark. For a match that consists of a lot of walloping and havoc and bloodcurdling, it can feel like overkill, though in their defence they are thoroughly entertaining all the while.

The lesser-spotted MYSTIC ISHII

As the match wears on, it does give rise to the idea that this is indeed Honma's moment. Neither man can finish the job, neither Honma with Ishii's Brainbuster nor Ishii with a lariat series. Both enter the final stretch dog-tired, throwing weary slaps, but ultimately of the two, only Ishii has the experience and legs to get to the finish line. He executes a Brainbuster, takes the fall, receives the title from the referee as if taking on extra paperwork for his car and leaves. Excellent. ****1/2

Ishii d. Honma to become new NEVER Openweight Champion

IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP
Shinsuke Nakamura (c) vs. Yuji Nagata 

An excellent video plays before commencement, mainly focused around tonight's challenger. Yuji Nagata is 46 and has done it all: twice IWGP Heavyweight Champion, one time G1 Climax winner and GHC Heavyweight Champion. He sits with his lovely-seeming wife (who even mirrors his traditional 'ZEA-H!' pose on command) and dotes on his cute son as a good dad. But a cutaway indicates that perhaps the current of NJPW is now passing him by. We see Nakamura, primus inter pares in his generation of trailblazers, younger men taking New Japan to the world. He worked the dark match at Wrestle Kingdom 9 and thought that he should perhaps retire.

BLUE JUSTICE LAWNCARE

Of course it is bollocks in a way: Nagata is a great wrestler and still relevant. He tossed off at least 10 top quality singles matches last year across the G1 Climax, NOAH Global League and his reign as GHC Heavyweight Champion. The erstwhile Daniel Bryan proclaimed him perhaps the best worker he's been in the ring with (maybe he says that of a few people, but still). Of course, he's not in the position of Shinsuke Nakamura, truly acclaimed as a global superstar of wrestling substance and unearthly style. But in reality, who is?

The first couple of paragraphs of this match are grappling, not exactly slow, but just working differently than the previous match to better parse the fits and spurts of excitement. Uncle Yuji decides he's had enough of that nonsense and kicks Nakamura around his hind quarters a couple of times and the fun begins.

He could probably carry this off

Momentum changes often and the tension slowly increases, with the Official Yuji Nagata Cheer Squad on commentary (Shinpei Nogami) and Nagata's fellow veterans Kojima, Tenzan and Nakanishi working the towel duties in the corner. The match is going pretty well - though markedly down on the match prior - until a moment just past halfway where Nakamura is prone. Nagata walks over and slaps him across the face as he lies there, waking the previously disrespectful Nakamura up into a fury.

Some timing issues aside, it's a fine main event between the star of one generation and the star of now, the latter of which prevails with a Boma Ye from a short distance after a series of near-misses by Nagata with the Backdrop Hold and the Armbreaker. Nakamura celebrates and makes a short speech, but no challenge is forthcoming. In reality, where can it come from? ****

Nakamura d. Nagata (third defence)

A fine show. This pair of shows was better than the 2014 version of this split experiment, so maybe the concept has legs.